Sometimes I like to take a lot of photos of little things around me that normally I wouldn’t pay much attention to. The idea for me is to take photos that capture these objects from a different perspective, from a different angle, than I would normally see them.

This usually means getting in a lot closer to the object than normal, which is where a macro lens would come in handy. But since my main camera at the moment is my phone, I don’t have that luxury most of the time.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been trying to test the phone’s camera to see how close I can get to objects, before it gives up in despair.

I tend not to use the zoom function on the camera, because it’s a digital zoom, so using it has the same effect as cropping the photo afterwards, and I find it easier to take the photo with more in the frame and crop out what I don’t want, rather than do it on the camera display.

I’ve been getting some pretty good results. Not macro by a long way, but still fun to play with once I start to edit the photos on the phone.

So for today’s post – and for Sunday Selections over at Frogpondsrock – here are some photos I took at the Gretna Green Hotel today.

We went there for lunch, and I’m sure the owner thought I was quite strange taking photos of random things around the dining room while we were waiting for our meals.

But there were some really interesting things that caught my eye. Because some of them are a bit abstract, I felt a bit more comfortable in using some of the more interesting filters on my phone to transform them.

Teapot on the mantelpiece

Beer!

Duck on the mantelpiece

Urn

Firewood

Spinning wheel

Artwork

Knot in a wooden bench

Intersection of wooden table & bench

Bells in the hallway

Now that I’ve done these, I’ve decided my theme for this week is to take a photo each day of something that I normally wouldn’t photograph or that I wouldn’t really notice, and try to make it look interesting.